Capitalism is great at generating capital and wealth, there is nothing you've proposed that would in any way prevent massive unequal wealth distribution. The closest we ever got to wealth equality in the United States was during and after the progressive period surrounding FDR's record breaking popularity and 4 terms in office. The New Deal, massive public works projects, the introduction of unemployment compensation, the Hoover Damn and TVA water authority, the Interstate Highway system, the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), and I could go on.

Fuck wealth equality. Money is not a mother's milk, it's an industrial resource needed in large amounts at one place. There is a whole ecology of money, big animals like IBM or Microsoft are needed to develop new technologies and mass produce them. On that mass production, countless thousands of middle sized business is running and lots of small business too, programmers and inventors who work with the mass-produced parts.
Nobody gets the upper hand, because no matter how big a company gets, there are always competitors of the same weight category.
Income equality is bullshit, a person is generating all the wealth and he is paying a big chunk of the industry from the wealth he generated. And that person is needed to decide how to invest that. If you ever watch rich person statistics, they go up and down in wealth over the years pretty often. Warren Buffet was repeatedly millions in debt and a millionaire in plus.
But that sort of gamble is necessary in order to produce things and feed people. Redistribution destroys production and in the end both welfare and productivity runs out.

Thanks for proving, once again, what a massive cunt you are.

I'm not saying that you eliminate incentives, or flatline everyones pay. What I'm saying is that the rampant, massive, wealth inequality that we have right now needs to be fixed; there is zero justification for it outside the greed of those in the top 0.01%. In the United States we live in a consumer driven economy, yet the wealthiest continue to bleed the very consumers they rely upon to buy their products. Why do American CEO's make thousands of times more than the average pay of their employees? You cannot sit here and seriously argue that they have earned it, done thousands of times more work, or that the comapnies benefit for paying for the best talent.

"Across the board, the more CEOs get paid, the worse their companies do over the next three years, according to extensive new research. This is true whether they’re CEOs at the highest end of the pay spectrum or the lowest. “The more CEOs are paid, the worse the firm does over the next three years, as far as stock performance and even accounting performance,” says one of the authors of the study, Michael Cooper of the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business."

"Another counter-intuitive conclusion: The negative effect was most pronounced in the 150 firms with the highest-paid CEOs. The finding is especially surprising given the widespread notion that it’s worth it to pay a premium to superstar CEOs like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase (who earned $20 million in 2013) or Lloyd Blankfein ($28 million) of Goldman Sachs. (The study doesn’t reveal individual results for them.) Though Cooper concedes that there could be exceptions at specific companies (the study didn’t measure individual firms), the study shows that as a group, the companies run by the CEOS who were paid at the top 10% of the scale, had the worst performance. How much worse? The firms returned 10% less to their shareholders than did their industry peers. The study also clearly shows that at the high end, the more CEOs were paid, the worse their companies did; it looked at the very top, the 5% of CEOs who were the highest paid, and found that their companies did 15% worse, on average, than their peers."

Their excessive pay is hurting their companies, and the overall trend is bad for everyone. They use their massive wealth to buy undue influence, allowing them to cause even more disastrous effects; and everyone else gets gutted in the process. When left to their own devices, companies can and will do whatever they can get away with; and your magical thinking will do fuck all to stop them.

In other words, go eat a dick.

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote:

(18-08-2014 03:43 AM)EvolutionKills Wrote: What would your system do to prevent the exploitation of banana republics by multinational corporations? Near as I can tell, absolutely nothing. Somehow the people, by the nature/magic of the market, will somehow magically know about it and prevent it through their purchasing power. This is entirely ignorant of how real world factors like misinformation and geography can easily prevent this from taking place and operating as intended.

"My system" would protect the banana republics by making it impossible to print money to buy weapons. All the banana republics and dictatorships set up by the U.S. were based on weapon industry funded by quantitatively eased (endlessly printed) dollar. Bitcoin and its derivates puts an end to that, together with central banking that fuels the military-industrial sector. In a free society, every gun and bullet will have to be paid by someone's hard work, not by fiat currency. That will literally end wars as we know them, which is a blood mill with lots of ammunition coming seemingly out of nowhere and guns lying around in heaps.

What cjlr said, Bitcoin is a fiat currency dumbass.

Also, your magical thinking will not end wars or the production of munitions. Supply and demand; do you really think there will be no demand? And given your anarcho-capitalist unregulated free-market, who in the actual fuck is going to prevent people from making and selling whatever weapons they can sell? You've already said 'fuck wealth equality', so there will be people with massive wealth; who are you to say they won't have the means and the desire to purchase weapons and hire people to use them to forward their interests? You know, sort of like a state?

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote:

(18-08-2014 03:43 AM)EvolutionKills Wrote: Corporations can buy the media now for their own propaganda purposes. What makes you think less or no regulation will improve that?

Let's see how they will buy media if they can't get free printed government money on subsidies and advantageous govt regulations.

Magical thinking doesn't count Lumi. Without regulation, there is nothing to stop someone from amassing a large and disproportionate amount of capital/wealth, and then using that to buy influence and propaganda; regardless of the means of transaction (dollars, bitcoins, credits, goat testicales, stone wheels, your mom, etc.). We invented money because it was more convenient than bartering or lugging around stones; what in the actual fuck makes you think people won't immediately create and start using currency again?

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote:

(18-08-2014 03:43 AM)EvolutionKills Wrote: Where would the individual or corporate incentive be to research the effect of lead in paint, or the link between cigarettes and lung cancer?

Insurance companies will want that very much to decrease their costs. Sick or injured people cost them money, so they would sponsor this research and offer discounts to people who go along with safety measures such as regular health checks.

Why have insurance at all? There are no regulations saying you must have insurance, and there are no regulations guaranteeing that they keep to their contractual obligations. There is no regulator body to make sure that they are licensed legitimate insurance companies, nor are there laws and regulations dictating how they operate. Public trust would be at nill, and information would be hard to come by because of decentralized information (few will have access to the information that would help them) provided by the non-standardized and unregulated media infrastructure. There is nothing enforcing fairness or standards in advertising. Given how unregulated things would be, the risks would be too great and the risk pool would be too small, to be at all feasible.

Simply put, an insurance company wouldn't even survive in this environment; it would be an unnecessary liability and relic.

We have seen this before, in the American frontier and the Wild West; a time of unregulated free-market capitalism that lead to such cultural icons as the Snake-Oil Salesman.

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote:

(18-08-2014 03:43 AM)EvolutionKills Wrote: How would our food get safer with the abolition of the FDA?

What makes you think corporations don't want to produce safe food? If they can't get money from government subsidies, which they do today, they will orient themselves on customers. And if some corporation produces unsafe things, and customers still buy it (they likely won't), and it causes real problems, then insurance companies would up the fees and people would reconsider if it's worth it to them.
Of course, a DRO could punish a company severely by stopping to insure their contracts, so anyone could break the deal with them without punishment, if they wish so. Or by upping the price on contract insurance, until they get the products checked.
FDA has no economic motivation to keep the food safe, if there's a problem with food, FDA will just say, that's why you need FDA. If food was all safe, FDA would find itself with lower funding and that can't happen.

Because even now, food produces have a profit motive to cut corners to make their food cheaper. Without regulation, what is to prevent them from cutting more corners in the name of increasing profits? Nothing, because once again; companies can and will do whatever they can get away with. Less regulation does not magically fix this. And who will enforce and regulate DRO's? Certainly not the government, as that would be interfering with the free-market! Who else would have the power to enfoce anything without the use of force? Once you sign off on never using force, you must realize that you can never force compliance.

I've already explained why insurance companies simply won't be economically feasible in your anarchic utopia, so they're out. Even if they weren't, what would they need insurance for? No regulations means no liability, so customers have no way to get back at the company short of boycotting after the fact; assuming of course that the consumers can actually afford to do so, and their message hasn't been drowned out by the company's own propaganda (remember, fuck wealth equality, so the company will have greater means than any of the consumers to get their message out there and be heard). There is also zero guarantee that there will be other produces that can or will be competing with them for any number of reasons (geographic or regional monopoly, corporate trust, cartel, etc.). It's simply easier, and cheaper, to lie about a problem than to actually fix it. Until you can solve this, without resorting to magical thinking and feels, your anarcho-capitalist free-market will be far from the perfect utopia you imagine it to be.

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote:

(18-08-2014 03:43 AM)EvolutionKills Wrote: You've yet to ever offer a reasonable answer, that didn't rely on magic and feels, for these very simple questions. And you wonder why we all think you're full of shit...

I provide reasonable answers. Your answer is fiat currency and rules for people who have immunity in courts.

Bitcoin is a fiat currency fuckstick. I also advocate for equal protection under the law, so if there are people exempt from it, those laws need to be changed; simple as that. But you're too fucking ideologicall obtuse to understand common sense.

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote: My answers are economic interests. If you want money but have no government violence to back you up, you must do a good job, make safe products, try to be better than competition and win a customer over, that's how you make money.

Assuming a rational, intelligent, well informed consumer bases with access to many alternative options that they can afford.

All of that is assumed, but none of it is guaranteed, in your anarcho-capitalist wet dream. The rest of us can see just how easily it falls apart once you take reality into account and stop glossing over human behavior, historical precedence, geography, and many other factors that you just assume rather than prove.

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote: If you don't, people will go to competition and you lose money. On free market, nobody is too big to fall, even the biggest corporations shrink or go under fast, if they provide a bad service that nobody wants. On free market, everyone is taken care of, as long as they are willing to go where the money are and do what customers want and not wait in one place for the money.

See point above. You are so naive about the nature of humans and reality that it hurts to read the shit you type. It is so infantile, so naive, so divorced from reality, that it literally hurts to read.

(18-08-2014 01:44 PM)Luminon Wrote: On free market, everyone is free to invent and try a hundred other and better solutions than I just wrote. Government doesn't need to change when it makes costly mistakes, it can always tax or print more.

(18-08-2014 03:03 PM)EvolutionKills Wrote: Because even now, food produces have a profit motive to cut corners to make their food cheaper. Without regulation, what is to prevent them from cutting more corners in the name of increasing profits? Nothing, because once again; companies can and will do whatever they can get away with. Less regulation does not magically fix this. And who will enforce and regulate DRO's? Certainly not the government, as that would be interfering with the free-market! Who else would have the power to enfoce anything without the use of force? Once you sign off on never using force, you must realize that you can never force compliance.

I never said about not using force. I meant not initiating force.
Plus, denial of service is not initiation of force and it is very effective as a punishment.
As for the food... People generally can't afford to pay doctor in cash, this is why health insurance exists. Health insurance is gets more profit if customers are healthy. This is why customers who aren't will pay more for health insurance, thus motivating them to eat healthy. This will force food companies to put healthy food on the market.
Also, most unhealthy food in the US such as McDonald's is government subsidized, such as the corn on which beef is grown. It takes 7 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef. On free market there is no way in hell that 1 pound of beef would be cheaper than 7 pounds of grain. No chance of that. I tell you, government subsidies make unhealthy food seem cheaper than it actually is. It's tax pre-paid.

(18-08-2014 03:03 PM)EvolutionKills Wrote: Assuming a rational, intelligent, well informed consumer bases with access to many alternative options that they can afford.

Do you imply that the consumer base isn't what you describe?
May I ask, who was in charge of educating the consumer base for the last 50 years or so?

(18-08-2014 03:03 PM)EvolutionKills Wrote: All of that is assumed, but none of it is guaranteed, in your anarcho-capitalist wet dream. The rest of us can see just how easily it falls apart once you take reality into account and stop glossing over human behavior, historical precedence, geography, and many other factors that you just assume rather than prove.

See point above. You are so naive about the nature of humans and reality that it hurts to read the shit you type. It is so infantile, so naive, so divorced from reality, that it literally hurts to read.

I'm going to skip the rampant financial sector wealth and CEOs, so far I saw all such things tracked to a government regulation. Free market makes common sense, shitty practices lead to shitty results.
I'm going to skip Bitcoin too, you can look up the difference to fiat currency by yourself.
But this is getting very interesting, i think I see some kind of discourse in what you say.

Can you please define me what is a "guarantee"? Especially in economic and social sense. Not political, that was already said. For example, what guarantee is there that people will come to work regularly or that there will be food in the shops every morning, that sort of thing.

You often say, "who is going to prevent people from" and "who is going to prevent corporations from"...
Can you sum up the motivations and goals of people that they need to be prevented from? Who can prevent them and what about the preventor's or regulator's motivation?

What is this reality and human behavior? Can you flat-out describe the model of human behavior you work with? Can people be trusted to do their job? Is there a moral difference between people doing business and people in public sector?

(18-08-2014 03:03 PM)EvolutionKills Wrote: When left to their own devices, companies can and will do whatever they can get away with; and your magical thinking will do fuck all to stop them.

Can you tell me what do you think of the following video, Edgar the Exploiter? Please watch it whole, it talks about outlawing unfair business practices.

Are people able to react to consequences of their actions?
You seemed to imply that this is not the case and that people need to be regulations to ensure that people have insurance, implying they can not be relied upon go and get one from their own will.

What is a "licensed legitimate (insurance) company"? How does it differ from an unlicensed illegitimate one, which provides the same or better service? Are customers unable to tell a difference?

What is public trust? Why can't it just be fixed by offering lower prices?
What is fairness and standards? What motivates people to break them? Why do they need to be enforced? By whom? What about the enforcers' fairness and standards?

What do you think that a higher risk stops the business altogether instead of just increasing the prices?

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the full head-up-ass intransigence of ol' Lumi here?

I mean, first he makes a point contingent on contrasting fiat currency on one hand with Bitcoins on the other. Then it's pointed out that Bitcoins could not possibly be more fiat. And then, of course, he drops the subject as completely as if he'd never mentioned it.

Now that's what I call some top-flight discussion.

The flawless logic of the True Believer: there are no such things as facts. There are only Correct Thought and Incorrect Thought, and so-called facts exist to serve them.

of course on the other hand, Bitcoins are not fiat currency by virtue of not technically being currency in the first place, but that was hardly the point

(18-08-2014 04:48 PM)cjlr Wrote: Can we just take a moment to appreciate the full head-up-ass intransigence of ol' Lumi here?

I mean, first he makes a point contingent on contrasting fiat currency on one hand with Bitcoins on the other. Then it's pointed out that Bitcoins could not possibly be more fiat. And then, of course, he drops the subject as completely as if he'd never mentioned it.

Now that's what I call some top-flight discussion.

The flawless logic of the True Believer: there are no such things as facts. There are only Correct Thought and Incorrect Thought, and so-called facts exist to serve them.

of course on the other hand, Bitcoins are not fiat currency by virtue of not technically being currency in the first place, but that was hardly the point

We are back to the initiation of force that was destroyed about 10 pages ago. He is absorbing absolutely nothing being said.

Fiat commodity?

(31-07-2014 04:37 PM)Luminon Wrote: America is full of guns, but they're useless, because nobody has the courage to shoot an IRS agent in self-defense

(18-08-2014 04:52 PM)Revenant77x Wrote: We are back to the initiation of force that was destroyed about 10 pages ago. He is absorbing absolutely nothing being said.

Fiat commodity?

Circular reasoning works because circular reasoning works because circular reasoning works because circular reasoning works...

To a great extent so-called virtual "currencies" are sui generis; Bitcoins have so far most resembled a volatile commodity market. Incidentally, it's somewhat hilarious to watch as control over them has become ever-more consolidated and use of them has become ever-more regulated by large brokers

(18-08-2014 04:52 PM)Revenant77x Wrote: We are back to the initiation of force that was destroyed about 10 pages ago. He is absorbing absolutely nothing being said.

Fiat commodity?

Circular reasoning works because circular reasoning works because circular reasoning works because circular reasoning works...

To a great extent so-called virtual "currencies" are sui generis; Bitcoins have so far most resembled a volatile commodity market. Incidentally, it's somewhat hilarious to watch as control over them has become ever-more consolidated and use of them has become ever-more regulated by large brokers

Thus why I only argue for the reader not for Loony Lumy.

It's a wonder he is still using an example that basically is disproving all of his stated axioms and showing the all to real dangers everyone is bringing up. Granted it is probably because Molyneux never updated the fact that he was wrong (shocking I know) about bitcoins so his flock still parrot his disproven message.

(31-07-2014 04:37 PM)Luminon Wrote: America is full of guns, but they're useless, because nobody has the courage to shoot an IRS agent in self-defense

(18-08-2014 04:48 PM)cjlr Wrote: Can we just take a moment to appreciate the full head-up-ass intransigence of ol' Lumi here?

I mean, first he makes a point contingent on contrasting fiat currency on one hand with Bitcoins on the other. Then it's pointed out that Bitcoins could not possibly be more fiat. And then, of course, he drops the subject as completely as if he'd never mentioned it.

Now that's what I call some top-flight discussion.

The flawless logic of the True Believer: there are no such things as facts. There are only Correct Thought and Incorrect Thought, and so-called facts exist to serve them.

of course on the other hand, Bitcoins are not fiat currency by virtue of not technically being currency in the first place, but that was hardly the point

These objections are so stupid that it hurts and yet you join in them. Bitcoin is not fiat currency, because it has built-in limited emission and it is not a national currency forced into use by taxation. In case someone broke the code and started mass-producing it, everyone would abandon it freely. And if someone had enough computing power to crack the Bitcoin protocol, he would be probably so rich already that this would not be profitable to him, considering people would just stop using it.
And someone here claimed it is not a currency at all, it is a commodity!
Currency is not a natural phenomenon, although societies naturally create it to fit their needs. It is an artificial instrument that needs to be created. A created currency can not equal fiat currency, or all money would be fiat and the word would be meaningless, it wouldn't exist to begin with.
Decide which is it, prove it and until then don't feed your fellow trolls.

(18-08-2014 05:31 PM)Luminon Wrote: These objections are so stupid that it hurts and yet you join in them. Bitcoin is not fiat currency, because it has built-in limited emission and it is not a national currency forced into use by taxation.

Please look up the definition of "fiat currency". Because that isn't it.

Fiat currency ≠ unconstrained money supply.
Fiat currency ≠ legal tender.
(hint: those are the two criteria you just gave. They are wrong)

Jesus fuck, dude. Read a book.

(18-08-2014 05:31 PM)Luminon Wrote: In case someone broke the code and started mass-producing it, everyone would abandon it freely.

Yes, and everyone's investments would be worthless. How is that supposed to avoid market bubbles, again?

No, if someone were to have sufficient control to appropriate the chain (hint: people already do) then they would defraud it in such a way as to not give it away immediately.

(18-08-2014 05:31 PM)Luminon Wrote: And if someone had enough computing power to crack the Bitcoin protocol, he would be probably so rich already that this would not be profitable to him, considering people would just stop using it.

Actually, though, you can't just declare random shit and call it sufficient.

(18-08-2014 05:31 PM)Luminon Wrote: And someone here claimed it is not a currency at all, it is a commodity!

... because it is.

Because it does not meet the generally agreed-upon criteria for constituting currency, as would be explained by any competent economist or economic text. You may have heard of The Economist. They are generally regarded as perhaps some slight authority on economics.

(18-08-2014 05:31 PM)Luminon Wrote: Currency is not a natural phenomenon, although societies naturally create it to fit their needs. It is an artificial instrument that needs to be created. A created currency can not equal fiat currency, or all money would be fiat and the word would be meaningless, it wouldn't exist to begin with.

This is word salad.

All value is created contextually by society, by the way. If you start trying to tell me that shiny rocks have intrinsic and inalienable value then I shall turn to tears. All currencies are fiat by the strictest denotative sense, but within the field of economics that term has acquired a more specialised meaning. But we already know how bad you are with understanding words and what they mean.

PS: "fiat currency" manifestly still does not mean what you think it means. Read a book.

(18-08-2014 05:31 PM)Luminon Wrote: Decide which is it, prove it and until then don't feed your fellow trolls.

By extending to you the benefit of the doubt that you are not in fact an idiot - and I do so begrudgingly - I am faced with the absolute conviction that you are too ignorant to realize your own ignorance.